Cybersecurity researchers have alerted to a brand new malvertising marketing campaign that is concentrating on people and companies promoting through Google Ads by making an attempt to phish for his or her credentials through fraudulent adverts on Google.
“The scheme consists of stealing as many advertiser accounts as potential by impersonating Google Ads and redirecting victims to faux login pages,” Jérôme Segura, senior director of risk intelligence at Malwarebytes, stated in a report shared with The Hacker News.
It’s suspected the tip aim of the marketing campaign is to reuse the stolen credentials to additional perpetuate the campaigns, whereas additionally promoting them to different legal actors on underground boards. Based on posts shared on Reddit, Bluesky, and Google’s personal help boards, the risk has been energetic since at the least mid-November 2024.
The exercise cluster is lots just like campaigns that leverage stealer malware to steal knowledge associated to Facebook promoting and enterprise accounts with a view to hijack them and use the accounts for push-out malvertising campaigns that additional propagate the malware.
The newly recognized marketing campaign particularly singles out customers who seek for Google Ads on Google’s personal search engine to serve bogus adverts for Google Ads that, when clicked, redirect customers to fraudulent websites hosted on Google Sites.
These websites then function touchdown pages to guide the guests to exterior phishing websites which are designed to seize their credentials and two-factor authentication (2FA) codes through a WebSocket and exfiltrated to a distant server below the attacker’s management.
“The faux adverts for Google Ads come from quite a lot of people and companies (together with a regional airport), in varied places,” Segura stated. “Some of these accounts already had a whole lot of different professional adverts operating.”
An ingenious facet of the marketing campaign is that it takes benefit of the truth that Google Ads doesn’t require the ultimate URL – the net web page that customers attain after they click on on the advert – to be the identical because the show URL, so long as the domains match.
This permits the risk actors to host their intermediate touchdown pages on websites.google[.]com whereas holding the show URLs as adverts.google[.]com. What’s extra, the modus operandi entails the usage of strategies like fingerprinting, anti-bot site visitors detection, a CAPTCHA-inspired lure, cloaking, and obfuscation to hide the phishing infrastructure.
Malwarebytes stated the harvested credentials are subsequently abused to register to the sufferer’s Google Ads account, add a brand new administrator, and make the most of their spending budgets for faux Google adverts.
In different phrases, the risk actors are taking on Google Ads accounts to push their very own adverts with a view to add new victims to a rising pool of hacked accounts which are used to perpetuate the rip-off additional.
“There seems to be a number of people or teams behind these campaigns,” Segura stated. “Notably, nearly all of them are Portuguese audio system and sure working out of Brazil. The phishing infrastructure depends on middleman domains with the .pt top-level area (TLD), indicative of Portugal.”
“This malicious advert exercise doesn’t violate Google’s advert guidelines. Threat actors are allowed to indicate fraudulent URLs of their adverts, making them indistinguishable from professional websites. Google has but to indicate that it takes definitive steps to freeze such accounts till their safety is restored.”
The disclosure comes as Trend Micro revealed that attackers are utilizing platforms similar to YouTube and SoundCloud to distribute hyperlinks to faux installers for pirated variations of common software program that in the end result in the deployment of assorted malware households similar to Amadey, Lumma Stealer, Mars Stealer, Penguish, PrivateLoader, and Vidar Stealer.
“Threat actors usually use respected file internet hosting companies like Mediafire and Mega.nz to hide the origin of their malware and make detection and removing tougher,” the corporate stated. “Many malicious downloads are password-protected and encoded, which complicates evaluation in safety environments similar to sandboxes and permits malware to evade early detection.”